WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump says his administration will suspend the security clearances of more than four dozen former intelligence officials who signed a 2020 letter saying the The Hunter Biden Laptop Saga bore the hallmarks of a “Russian information operation”.
The action is an early indication of Trump’s determination to exact retaliation against perceived adversaries and is the latest point of tension between Trump and an intelligence community he has openly disdained. The sweeping move, announced by executive order Monday, also paves the way for a possible legal challenge from former officials seeking to maintain access to sensitive government information.
“The president has a lot of authority when it comes to security clearances. The problem the White House will face is that if it deviates from its existing procedures, it could launch a legal appeal for these 51 people – and it will likely be a class action since they are all in identical or similar circumstances. ” said Dan Meyer, a Washington attorney who specializes in the security clearance and background check process.
The decree targets the authorization of 50 people in total, including the 49 surviving signatories. The list includes prominent officials like James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence under President Barack Obama, and John Brennan, Obama’s former CIA director. John Bolton, who was fired as Trump’s national security adviser during his first term and later wrote a book whose publication the White House sought to block on the grounds that it disclosed national security information.
It is unclear how many former officials still hold security clearances.
Mark Zaid, a lawyer who represents eight people who signed the letter, said Trump’s action serves as a “public policy message to his right-wing base,” although the practical impact may not be significant for those who no longer have or need authorization. . He said he would sue the administration on behalf of any customers who wanted to challenge the order.
“Nothing in any of this shows me, regardless of presidential authority, that this action is not subject to existing law and policy that mandates substantive due process,” Zaid said.
This is an October 2020 letter signed by former intelligence officials who raised the alarm about the provenance of emails reported by The New York Post allegedly came from a laptop that President Joe Biden’s son Hunterhad been dropped off at a computer repair shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The newspaper said it obtained a hard drive of the laptop from Rudy Giuliani, a longtime Trump ally, and that the communications it published concerned Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Ukraine.
The letter’s signatories wrote that they did not know whether the emails were authentic or not, but that their emergence had “all the classic hallmarks of a Russian information operation.”
But Trump’s director of national intelligence, John Ratcliffe – also his current choice to lead the CIA – contradicted that assessment by saying there was no intelligence to support the idea that Russia had anything to see with Hunter Biden’s laptop. The FBI, which was conducting its own criminal investigations into the younger Biden, appeared to back up Ratcliffe’s statement by telling Congress in a letter that it had nothing to add to what he had said.
Hunter Biden was later convicted of tax and gun charges, but he was pardoned last month by his father.
Although courts have historically been reluctant to intervene in disputes involving security clearances, Trump’s unilateral suspension constitutes a departure from standard protocol under which each executive agency would be responsible for opening an investigation into an individual’s fitness to obtain clearance or whether it should be. revoked.
Throughout his first presidency, Trump railed against an intelligence community that he said had been politicized against him, repeatedly citing the investigation into ties between Russia and his 2016 campaign. In August 2018, he announced that he had revoked Brennan’s authorizationwho led the CIA during the early days of the Russia investigation and became a prominent Trump critic.
